Amanda Vaill > Quotes

“There are no authenticated portraits of Angelica Hamilton; but the Cincinnati Art Museum owns an anonymous miniature on ivory, dated roughly 1794, which is thought to be of Alexander Hamilton with Alexander Jr., James, baby John, and a strawberry-blond Angelica.”
― Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution

“Next year, however, the legislators who witnessed Hamilton’s speech from the gallery will pass a new libel law, allowing truth as a defense to a libel charge “where published with good motive and for justifiable ends.” And sixteen years later, in 1821, this principle will be incorporated into New York’s second constitution. Hamilton, though, won’t be there to see it.”
― Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution

“We have always believed it good to leave a place before it leaves you.”
― Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story

“The portrait described here is in the possession of the Cincinnati Art Museum; it was previously owned by Allan McLane Hamilton, the son of Philip Hamilton, who after his sister’s death inherited William Hamilton’s estate. The museum dates it 1821, seemingly using as a benchmark a similar portrait of ESH by Henry Inman in the collection of the New York Historical; but the Inman portrait is of an older woman, with more lines in her face and greyer hair. It seems probable that the Cincinnati portrait was painted earlier, and a date of 1817 fits both Eliza’s age and the circumstances.”
― Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution

“Le Bal du comte d’Orgel.”
― Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story

“In a road-mender’s hut near Vézelay they found a message scrawled on the wall: “La vie est un desert, la femme un chameau. Pour voir le desert il faut monter sur le chameau.” (“Life is a desert, woman is a camel. If you want to see the desert you have to ride the camel.”)”
― Amanda Vaill, Everybody Was So Young: Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story

“There can be no compromise, no truce,” the general told Allen then. “I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I will save Spain from marxism at whatever cost.” “That means,” Allen asked, for clarification, “that you will have to shoot half Spain?” Franco smiled. “I said whatever the cost.” The Spanish Civil War had begun.”
― Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

“how to write truly and having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.”
― Amanda Vaill, Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

“But by 1787 Europe was largely ruled by kings, or emperors, or feudal lords, the exceptions being the tiny self-governing cantons of Switzerland, and the Netherlands, a confederation that called itself “a sovereign nation of sovereign states,” presided over by a hereditary stadtholder, with a legislature chosen by town councils whose members served for life.”
― Amanda Vaill, Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution